Re: Scrabble, Officially

bill van <billvan@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>In article <qKSdneSUJK0AqnbanZ2dnUVZ_ufinZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,

>> No, the rules were consistent, they just allowed for cheating under 
>> certain cir***stances. It was kind of like politics in that regard.
>
>Ah, but those words you think of as examples of the computer cheating -- 
>ar and qi, say -- are consistent with an official set of rules that 
>allow the way letters sound to be spelled out, and that allow qualifying 
>foreign words that are rendered into English. 

Then it's no longer the game it was advertised to be.  Once you start
allowing some weird foreign words in, then why not any word ever
spoken in any language?

Play the game with a dictionary in the native language of the players.

>People who are into 
>scrabble at a high level memorize lists of allowable two-letter words; 
>they're handy for making overlapping words that score good points with 
>modest letters. That you don't know them is your shortcoming, not the 
>computer's. But the words you're making up are definitely not words. So 
>it's you cheating, actually. 

And AA and QI are not words either.  Once you start inserting words
into the dictionary because they yield neat scores, it's not a game I
will be playing with you.

When I was a teen, the house rules we ended up with were that we'd
pick one of the five dictionaries in the house at random.  If the word
that my brother had picked up somewhere wasn't in the dictionary we
were using THIS TIME, then that's a chance he took for using a word
that's not in mainstream English.

-- 
Tomorrow is today already.
Greg Goss, 1989-01-27